Hold Off the Earth Awhile
by blacktop
Summary: In the hours immediately after the events of In Extremis, Reese and Carter - separated, isolated, and shaken - ponder the meaning of the gruesome acts they have performed.


**Hold Off the Earth Awhile**

_Author's note: The scenes in this story are set in the immediate aftermath of the episode _In Extremis_. The phrases in italics are from the broadcast episode. The story's title is a quote from Hamlet's grief-stricken friend Laertes as he leaps into the open grave to embrace the body of his drowned sister Ophelia. _Hamlet, Act 5, Scene i

I

Finch's words ricocheted off the mottled brass banisters as Reese raced down the library stairs.

"There's nothing more to be done, John. I've arranged to pick up Bear tomorrow."

Reese paused at the entrance to the limestone mausoleum, his back to his friend, his head tilted to catch the final words.

Moldering piles of books balanced precariously on either side of the door, leather bindings peeling or flaking or just crumbling in their idiosyncratic decline into dust.

Silhouetted on the landing above, Finch perversely lowered his voice so that his friend had to strain to hear the next sentences.

"Rest is the prescribed treatment now, Mr. Reese. Just go home and rest. There's nothing more you can do at present."

Reese touched gloved hands to the door frame at shoulder height as he passed under the ornately carved lintel.

Taking the measure of the narrow space, he ran index fingers down the deep fluting of the stone columns flanking him and then sank into the chilled shadows of the street.

II

Carter's first impulse was to deliver the dog to his owners with mud of the grave still caked on his flanks and oozing between his claws.

She wanted them as dirty as she was.

She wanted them to know what it felt like to dig up a decayed body, what it smelled like when the corruption and stench belched up out of the grave as soon as she moved the first shovelful of dirt. She wanted them to know how it sounded when she pulled at the dead man's pant leg and the little bones of his murdered feet tumbled out onto her boots.

The plastic bags she had brought were big enough to carry what was left of Fusco's partner. And it only took three trips to drag the sacks to her car.

She drove away from the grave site with the windows down, the first flakes of an early spring snow shower drifting against her cheeks as she escaped that wooded clearing. Finding a secluded new bed for those unsettled bones hadn't been as difficult as she had feared.

She wanted them to know all of that.

She wanted them to see the filth of the grave on her face and hands and boots.

But now speeding away from the precinct house, the hum of the traffic worked its usual magic on her jangled nerves.

She was a city girl through and through.

So the clatter of the bicycle messengers darting in front of her cruiser, the ripe threats of self-righteous cabbies, the fleeting laughter of workers lounging above an open manhole, soothed her mind.

These abrasive sounds of the living city pushed from her thoughts the eerie stillness of that wooded clearing and the grave's mute mouth.

She looked into the rear-view mirror and caught the dog's bright eye as he stretched along the back bench of her car.

"Ready for a bath, Bear?"

Heavy tail thumping against the plaid blanket, his jaw gaped in an eager grin. The plan was approved.

So with an abrupt wrench of the steering wheel, she reversed the car and headed downtown, John's pristine loft near Chinatown her new goal.

III

In the abstract, Finch's instruction made sense.

Reese knew he needed to shower, to eat, to sleep. These mechanics of physical recovery would serve as rigid guide wires, forcing his psyche in the direction he needed to go.

Like cleaning a weapon, unvarying precision was the key to safety now. If he executed each act in the proper way, in the proper sequence, the outcome was assured. He would be restored to working order.

Shower, eat, sleep. At least he hoped the routine would work.

He needed to cleanse the recent images of failure and bitter neglect from his mind. He couldn't get his job done if the shards of Doctor Nelson's whiskey glass continued to glitter on the hard surfaces of his memory. If Carter's low anguished voice still carved trenches in his thoughts, he couldn't focus on his mission.

Betrayed and poisoned, Nelson had been in pain and he was too late to do anything about it; Joss, abandoned, was in pain too and he couldn't do anything about it.

Shower, eat, sleep. The mandated steps were easy, the requirements indisputable.

But muscle memory, that traitorous automaton, spurred on by conscience perhaps, took the wheel and diverted his car from the prescribed path toward home. Once in the traffic's torrent, he had to keep going.

So before he was able to fully focus, Reese found himself on the Long Island Expressway headed toward a grave site in Oyster Bay.

IV

Carter knew this was not what John had intended when he gave her the key to his loft, but this was how she used it for the first time.

She pushed against the door panels cautiously, as if she feared he might be inside waiting.

But it was quiet and dim, even as the huge windows caught the low slanting beams of the day's last sunshine. She stood for a moment on the threshold, rocking slightly over its raised plank.

The place seemed so much like John – austere, reticent, unyielding – that she faltered in her purpose. Standing in the door frame now she felt so much like an intruder that her breath caught in her throat.

She was nothing more than a burglar really, a sneak thief with filth on her hands.

But after all she'd seen in the past twenty-four hours, after all she had done, she'd be damned if she let the dog smear her apartment with that gruesome mud.

So she unzipped her short boots and placed them next to the door, toes pointing toward the exit. Clumps of dried earth flaked off onto the gleaming wooden floor. Despite her bitterness, she still wanted to keep this main room as clean as she could in the circumstances.

But the dog had no such qualms. He was home and he pushed past her knees into the loft. He barked once and then took a triumphal trot around the apartment, sniffing the chairs and leather couch, his tail banging cheerily against the metal pole of the chrome floor lamp. He left rust red mud and black soil at every corner, a convoluted trail of parti-colored prints marking his passage.

"Bear! Didn't I tell you to go straight to the shower with those dirty paws? Now get!"

She pointed at the bathroom door and stamped her foot for emphasis. But her thick black socks muffled the effect of the reprimand even though she did it twice.

The dog looked in the direction she indicated, tilting his head in happy curiosity. But when she didn't move there or throw anything that way, he paced slowly to the kitchen and sat down with firm resolution before the louvered doors of the pantry.

Carter followed him to the kitchen, tossing her black leather jacket on the divan that dominated the room.

"First things first, hunh boy?"

She found a scoop on the top shelf of the pantry and ladled out a generous portion of kibbles into Bear's enormous blue bowl. She filled another bowl with water and placed it near the dog's furiously working jaws.

"Hungry, aren't you? You'll get a treat, too. Once we get cleaned up."

She thought about finding something for herself. Her back hurt and she wanted to take an aspirin, but first she needed food. She hadn't consumed anything other than coffee in more than a day.

But seeing the dog eat with such vigor and innocent purpose, her stomach rebelled in delayed horror. Watching the loops of saliva swing from his teeth drove the gall up into her throat, its bitterness stinging the back of her mouth.

She ran to the bathroom and crouched in front of the dark green toilet. With her arms extended along both flanks of the bowl, she vomited and vomited. Her sides ached and her stomach roiled in aimless contractions.

The retching went on long after she was emptied and exhausted.

V

Highway construction and a two-car accident on the LIE delayed Reese's travel, so that twilight was condensing on the horizon when he arrived at the grave site.

He had known for more than eighteen months exactly where Fusco had buried his partner because he had teased enough geographical details out of the cop to narrow its location. And then in an abundance of caution, he had worked with Finch to pinpoint the freshly turned plot on satellite images of Oyster Bay.

Now he parked his sedan in the tracks of the back hoe used that morning by NYPD to claw up the earth over Jimmy Stills' grave. An army of police investigators - some in work boots with heavy treads, others in fancy loafers with slick soles - had tramped over the entire site.

But Reese wanted to be sure that they had obliterated all traces of Carter's smaller boot prints. So he divided the area into quadrants and stalked back and forth across each sector until he was sure no evidence of her presence was visible. He found two prints he knew must be hers and he pounded the soil all around them until they were erased.

He recognized Bear's tracks among the human prints. He knew his dog's feet were larger than those of the police canines brought to the scene. So he stamped over Bear's prints too.

When he was done, Reese turned at last to study the grave itself.

The earth was much redder than he had imagined, looking bright and raw against the fluffy mantle of snow at the lip of the trench. He squatted on his haunches at the edge, looking into the grave's maw.

He pictured Fusco dragging his partner's body through the woods, grunting and puffing at the effort. Stills was as heavy as Fusco, taller too, so the work would have raised a sweat on Fusco's face even on that abnormally cold September night.

Reese figured Fusco could have rolled the body the last few paces, letting it slide into the grave. Or maybe he jumped in first and pulled the corpse down on top of himself. Either way, it was a vile rough business.

Then, although he desperately didn't want to, Reese thought about Carter.

He imagined her pulling that same body back out of this grave the previous night. He pictured her digging through the loose earth with a flat spade; she probably brought a pick axe as well, but didn't need to use it.

_At the moment, nothing. I'm busy._

He imagined that awful instant when she first exposed the craw of the grave and inhaled the hellish stench that shot from it like a geyser. She would have been knocked back by the reek. He was sure she cursed him and Finch and Fusco and Stills then.

_I always thought he was your partner._

But after only a minute of doubt, he was sure she would have steeled herself against the rot. To better leverage her shovel, she might have jumped down into the pit and kept on digging until she struck the shoulder blade or pelvis or skull. The body would be badly decomposed after so long in the ground, so it would be lighter, easier to throw into plastic bags and carry back to her car.

_Listen Carter, no one ever looked at me as the moral benchmark. Guess you'll have to make that call yourself._

He wondered how many trips Joss had to make between the grave and the car. He could see her straining and jerking at the heavy load of contamination, her feet slipping in the mire.

_In your book, once a dirty cop, always a dirty cop, right?_

The tears felt hot as they slipped down his face.

He wondered where Joss disposed of her tainted gloves, what she did with the shirt drenched in her sweat and the putrid odor of the grave. What did she do with the sweet elastic band she used to hold back her soft hair?

_You'll have to excuse me; I have to get back to work._

In a violent rush that startled him with its power, his gorge rose in revulsion at these thoughts. He ran toward a stand of saplings that curved around the west side of the clearing.

There, his knees and knuckles pressed into the dank carpet of leaves, Reese vomited a mix of clear bile and acids. With nothing more to expel, his stomach continued its pointless convulsions until he was sobbing in pain.

When the contractions ended, he wiped his lips with a dried leaf. And then to douse the burn of the acid he scooped up a handful of fresh snow and rinsed his mouth.

He wanted to go home to rest.

VI

Carter secretly thought of the oversized shower stall as a hidden green grotto, sleek and dark, tucked away under some enchanted mountain. This wasn't a fantasy she ever shared with John, certainly, but one that she enjoyed slipping into whenever she had a few moments alone.

Chrome panels mounted on two sides of the enclosure delivered powerful jets and a wide showerhead loosed gentle rain from above. She liked to keep the lights low in the stall when she was by herself; often she would just sit on the tiled bench knitting random thoughts with idle dreams as the spray cascaded all around her.

But when they showered together, John preferred to turn on the high beams and his insistent hands and needy mouth meant there was rarely time for actual thought at all.

Now she had to bring the horror of this day to an end and dreams had no place in the dreary business.

She decided the easiest way to shampoo Bear was to coax him into the shower with her. So she called the dog into the bathroom and shut the door behind him, in case this wasn't his idea of after-dinner fun.

He watched closed-mouthed and solemn as she stripped off her mud-streaked shirt, jeans, and underwear, piling them in a corner beyond the giant white tub.

But when she opened the glass door of the shower, Bear bounded through it with undisguised glee, his tongue lolling and his eyes dancing in delight.

There was no doubt that she would use her jasmine body gel on both of them.

She was sure that somewhere in the apartment John kept real dog shampoo, but she wasn't going to waste time searching for it. This jasmine, her scent, would do just fine.

Facing into a corner of the stall, Bear sat patiently while she turned the ceiling showerhead on to full blast. The muck of the night's work sluiced off of their bodies in a steady rush, rank smells washing away in gritty streams of black or red. Her sore back released its tension under the hot spray.

_After all we've been through, I thought he was your friend._

The very texture of her skin seemed to change as the grime slipped down the drain.

Slowly she worked the pink gel into lather between her palms and then smoothed the foamy peaks over her body. She rinsed off once and then applied the fragrant suds to Bear's back and shoulders. He stood still, head lowered, so that she could massage him with ease. When she sat down on the bench to wash her legs and feet, he sat too, this time well out of the pummeling spray.

_Not after what he's just told me. Do you know what he's done? He deserves to be behind bars._

She needed a second lathering so she found a loofah and charged it with more jasmine gel. The scent curled through her imagination, churning her thoughts as the wiry fibers chafed against her skin.

She scraped at spots on her forearms and shins, then scrubbed along her thighs and her elbows. She scoured the loofah across the backs of her hands until they turned red.

_I'm a cop, O.K.? But it's Fusco. It's not as simple as that._

Maybe a third soaping or even a fourth would be enough to finally buff away the memories that abraded her mind like gravel kicked along a rough path.

She turned her face up toward the gentle spray and let the rain mix with her tears.

VII

Jasmine's spicy flavors caressed him as he pushed back the door to his apartment.

Her scent worked its usual magic on his undeserving body and his cock surged in longing as he hesitated at the threshold.

Balancing for a moment within the door's sheltering frame, Reese surveyed the space.

He noted the dog tracks encircling the main room, the water splashed on the tiles next to two empty bowls in front of the pantry, the glint of silver from the zippers of Joss's leather jacket on the divan.

The intoxicating trace of delicate flowers surrounded him.

For a minute, even two, he imagined this was the normal clutter of a life he had earned, the tangible hints of a woman and a dog who claimed him in spite of himself.

He wanted this jasmine to be for him again.

Leaping across the wooden planks to greet him, Bear broke the spell. The dog butted his head hard against Reese's knees and then stepped back to sniff at the damp patches on his master's trouser legs.

Reese gripped the door jambs to steady himself against the dog's frenzied welcome.

"Bear! So it's you who smells so good!" He thought the laugh rasped with such insincere joviality that the dog flattened his ears and narrowed his eyes.

Reese heard movement above his head and, roughing up the dog's damp coat, paced four long strides to the center of the room.

He turned and looked up to see Joss standing at the top of the spiral stairs that led to the sleeping loft.

She was wearing the clean pair of jeans she had stored in his dresser weeks ago and a white t-shirt four sizes too big. With her hair piled in a messy knot at the top of her head and her brown face smooth and bare, he thought she looked like an angel.

She didn't smile or speak as she stepped down the stairs, her face now towards him, now turned away, now visible again as she descended.

He felt shy and ducked his head but his gaze never left her rotating form.

She kept her distance when she reached the bottom of the staircase, the dog standing sentry between them. But even at a remove, he could see how puffy her eyelids were, how chapped her hands looked, how she stood with a slight bend to her torso, maybe favoring a sore back.

As if suddenly aware of the crooked stance, she straightened up before her first words.

"I'm sorry about the mud." Her right hand swept in an arc to encompass the whole loft. And maybe everything beyond it.

He didn't want to talk about the dirty floor. But he couldn't think of anything he might say that would mean what he wanted her to know. So he just echoed her words.

"I'm sorry too, Joss."

Her eyes scanned him with what he imagined was simple interest; he couldn't hope for sympathy.

Grime lined his fingernails; reeking spots clotted on his overcoat. There were dank stains at his knees and his shoes were caked with blood red earth. He thought she must be reminded of the way he looked the night they first met in her precinct house.

Surely she could see now that he was still that unstable drifter, the bereft vagrant he had been before she came into his life.

Whatever she might have thought of him, she spoke next in the barest of utilitarian phrases.

"You look like you need to eat, John. Me too."

The very bluntness of her tone warmed him where soft words might have spooked him into a blacker despair.

"So go take a shower and I'll scramble some eggs for us both."

VIII

Carter thought John's skin, always parchment pale in the winter, looked like waxed paper when he emerged from the bathroom.

The shower had rinsed off the dust but his face was still gray, the skin pulled tight and opaque over his cheekbones. With wet hair scraped straight back from his brow and sooty eyelashes spiked with water, his skull had a funereal look which unnerved her.

From the kitchen, she watched him silently mount the stairs to search for clean clothes. The green towel knotted around his waist revealed the bones of his ribs and spine: he must have dropped ten pounds he could not afford to miss.

She thought John had never looked more lost or more alluring.

Her impulse was to run upstairs to join him, to bury this mess with kisses and wild promises. Desire pounded through her veins; but a residue of anger slowed the surge like silt damming up a river.

The rough fury was tamped down now, worn smooth by the passing hours. But it was still there just under the surface, the granules still prickly if she ran her mind against the grain.

She needed to stay resolute now, for both of them. If she did, they could both be safe. And happy again perhaps, in a warmer season.

Bread was violently popping from the unruly toaster when John re-entered the kitchen, dressed now in jeans and t-shirt that matched hers.

In silence they ate the eggs, scrambled soft and creamy the way he had taught her. The dog dozed on the leather sofa, paws twitching in paroxysms of galloping dreams.

She forgot to serve anything to drink until they had finished all the eggs and toast. So they stood side by side at the sink, gulping down milk, she from a glass, he from the carton.

When she spoke next, it was with finality.

"I'm not staying, you know."

"Yes."

"I need to get home, John. I've been away too long."

"I know."

She walked beside him to the door, pausing there while he held her jacket by the collar so she could slip her arms inside it.

"Tell Harold thanks for lending Bear to me."

"I will."

She zipped up the silver teeth and stuck her hands in the pockets.

Perhaps it was the shadow of the staircase or his skin's frosty pallor, but his eyes looked bluer than she had ever seen before.

"Joss, thank you for this. For all of it."

She thought the damned tears were starting in those eyes; she knew they were in hers.

"He's a good dog, John. A real good dog."

She put on her mud-fouled boots, cold and stiff as the grave, and left him standing in the open doorway.

When she reached the elevator and looked back, he was still there.


End file.
